Binding, a critical cognitive process likely mediated by attention, is essential for creating coherent object representations within a scene. This process is vulnerable in individuals with dementia, who exhibit deficits in visual working memory (VWM) binding, primarily tested using abstract arrays of standalone objects. To explore how binding operates in more realistic settings across the lifespan, we examined the impact of object saliency and semantic consistency on VWM binding and the role of overt attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive reserve (CR) explains the varying trajectories of cognitive decline in healthy and pathological ageing. CR is often operationalized in terms of socio-behavioural proxies that modulate cognitive performance. Individuals with higher CR are known to maintain better cognitive functions, but evidence on the underlying brain activity remains scattered.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "Sign-tracker/Goal-tracker" (ST/GT) is an animal model of individual differences in learning and motivational processes attributable to distinctive conditioned responses to environmental cues. While GT rats value the reward-predictive cue as a mere predictor, ST rats attribute it with incentive salience, engaging in aberrant reward-seeking behaviors that mirror those of impulse control disorders. Given its potential clinical value, the present study aimed to map such model onto humans and investigated resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of individuals categorized as more disposed to sign-tracking or goal-tracking behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReading comparisons across transparent and opaque orthographies indicate critical differences that may reveal the mechanisms involved in orthographic decoding across orthographies. Here, we address the role of criterion and speed of processing in accounting for performance differences across languages. We used binary tasks involving orthographic (words-pseudowords), and non-orthographic materials (female-male faces), and analyzed results based on Ratcliff's Diffusion model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study explores whether semantic processing in parafoveal reading in the Italian language is modulated by the perceptual and lexical features of stimuli by analyzing the results of the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm experiment, which simultaneously presented two words, with one in the fovea and one in the parafovea. The words were randomly sampled from a set of semantically related and semantically unrelated pairs. The accuracy and reaction times in reading the words were measured as a function of the stimulus length and written word frequency.
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